A Very Pissed Perspective on Republicans’ Fear of Renewables, Climate Change & Progress

Let’s be real for a moment. Right now, Donald Trump is leading the army of Republican nominees for President. According to CNN, his approval rating has surged over the past month to 18 percent, three points ahead of Jeb Bush, his closest competitor. In New Hampshire, he’s leading Bush by seven points.

It’s fair to say that Republicans have bigger ideological issues to deal with than whether or not greenhouse gases are bad for the planet. I say this not because Donald Trump oozes slime but because four years ago his party’s best shot at taking the White House was a stiff-necked milquetoast that alienated 47 percent of the electorate and didn’t understand why. Say what you will about Trump, he’s certainly got a personality; the problem is, his ability to empathize with that 47 percent – hell, the 99 percent – is just as limited.

But, to borrow a phrase from New Orleans, I say all this to say that whether or not the Republicans are even thinking about renewables right now, America’s energy landscape is changing. As it does so, it becomes harder to imagine Republicans will ever pull themselves from the atavistic cocoons they’ve woven from the moist money pawed off the fossil fuel industry.

It Wasn’t Always This Way

Republicans like to say that they were the party of Lincoln, the party that freed the slaves. And while Congressional Republicans fought hard for black civil rights in the 1960s, the man they chose to nominate for President in 1964, Barry Goldwater, wasunapologetically against the Civil Rights Act. An odd dichotomy, but presidential nominations are odd in so many ways…

Today, Republicans and Democrats have become much less willing to compromise, and while Democrats in general seem to be floundering for leadership, the most strident Republican leaders have seen fit to side increasingly with big business at the expense of the common man, with evangelical Christians at the expense of the unaffiliated or the mildly exotic man, against women’s rights, against gay rights and against the scientific consensus that industrialization is poisoning the Earth.

This is not to say that these issues have any relation to each other, merely that the Republican party sticks to its “conservative” ideas when those ideas are threatened by progress.

But lest this polemic divert into a full-fledged screed, I will focus on the matter at hand, namely, Republicans’ relatively recent anti-environmental stance.

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"All the while I have been forgetting the third of my reasons for remaining so faithful a citizen of the Federation, despite all the lascivious inducements from expatriates to follow them beyond the seas, and all the surly suggestions from patriots that I succumb. It is for the reason which grows out of my medieval but unashamed taste for the bizarre and indelicate, my congenital weakness for comedy of the grosser varieties. The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth."